Back to the subject, it can easily be proved than you cannot write a program in an higher level language that will outperform its assembly language competitor, assuming the development effort is not an issue.

Of course this is meaningless, as the development effort is always an issue.

Consequently assembly language is today a very specialized domain, largely because of the C language flexibility.

To sum up what everyone has posted.

Assembly language is the human readable notation for CPU instructions and machine language basicaly is the assembly language converted to numeric form. The assembler is the program that converts the human notation into machine language. And yes it is the function of the compiler to convert a high level language into assembly language, from assembly to machine code and then linking which is the process of creating an executable program.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_language

i cant claim that assembly is easier for me to read, but it is definately preferred..

and to throw in something worthwhile.. i have several books on assembly, and most of the authors seem to suggest that tweaking compiler generated code will get you more performance if you know where to look in the code and know what you are doing.

however, in practical use, you still have a bottleneck of file access, network useage, and printing to console/gui to contend with. you have to look at the efficiency of your efficiency efforts..